A felt mannequin veiled in a black satin gown shed a grim beauty and drew crowds from a packed and otherwise vibrant street of downtown Santa Fe on Saturday.

It’s a mourning dress stitched with motifs traditional to Oklahoma's Choctaw Nation which the artist began stitching at the onset of her father’s decline in health. She worked 12- or even 16-hour days for a month straight to show him the finished work of teardrop-shaped gems shortly before his death.

“ One day color will come back and then we will begin to heal,” said its creator Melissa Freeman, from Oklahoma City and of Choctaw and Chickasaw lineage. “And so in the future I will probably do something more with grays … as I'm going through my mourning process.”

And one day, “I will have a rainbow,” she said cracking a smile.

The

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